Deep Sleep

Project Overview

Deep Sleep moves backwards and forwards in time between a notorious Sydney psychiatric institution of the 1970’s, where patients were subjected to “deep sleep” therapy, and the Chelmsford Royal Commission, established in the 1990’s to investigate the many deaths that occurred there. Deep sleep therapy involved inducing patients into a coma lasting between one to eight weeks. Many patients either died during the sleep or awoke from it with varying degrees of impairment, ranging from permanent amnesia to chronic panic. The work acts as the backdrop for a double layered love story, firstly involving Dr Bailey, the director of Chelmsford, and one of his patients, a Dancer, and paralleled by an affair between a Royal Commission investigator and Bailey’s former Secretary. The story is composed of a series of narrative recollections exploring the events leading up to the Dancer’s death, Bailey’s suicide, the findings of the Commission Investigator and the involuntary memories of the Secretary.

While based on actual events and extensive research, the work uses the events as a way of exploring the interplay between the world of psychiatry and the world of psychosis. Its narrative operates as a dream-like theatre of encounters between the four characters in a landscape where the hallucinations of psychiatry overlap with the logic of psychosis. Just as in the world of sleep, where conventional logic is replaced by a dream logic which blurs all spatial and temporal boundaries, so in this work characters and narratives blend into each other, bringing the normal boundaries between image and sound into question. This is achieved by the interchangeability of narrative elements. For example, at some points in the script the same scenes are played but with different voice-overs. Because of these interchangeable relationships, the recollections of Bailey, the Dancer, the Investigator and the Secretary become so intertwined that it becomes impossible to delineate one from the other, either the frailty of the Patient, the reason of the Psychiatrist, the calculated analysis of the Investigator or the memories of the Secretary.

Deep Sleep video documentation

Exhibition

Remoteness, The Block and Parer Place Urban Screen, Brisbane, 2011

Once Upon a Time, Galerie Marion Scharmann, Cologne, 2010

Kava Kava, Kunstmuseum Muelheim, Muelheim, 2007

Crash, Lawrence Wilson Gallery, Perth, 2006

For Matthew and Others, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, 2006

Fantasmi, Sprengel Museum, Hanover, 2005

Line of Flight, China Millennium Museum, Beijing, 2005

Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, 2005

Preview Berlin, Berlin, 2005

Out of the Body Encounters, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 2005